Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Long long ago in
Palestine, two schools of thought emerged between two Judean intellectuals
named Hillel and Shammai. They debated more than 300 different issues, and
their debates spilled into the streets of Palestine, where partisans went at
each other like Bernie and Hillary. The intensification of brutality by an
occupying Roman military only made matters worse, because when people are under
pressure their differences become magnified.

Friday, November 18, 2016

I really want to work on my novels, but I keep getting
sucked into the vortex of political discussion. And yes, we have taken some
first steps for practical political action here in our little farm county.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Germany was inundated with visual propaganda under Hitler—paintings, posters, and statues. Masculinity, as it had been since the eugenics movement began in the West, was closely associated with “physical culture”— bodybuilding. The male form was represented in Nazi art as lean and heavily muscled, modeling its bodily archetypes on Greek and Roman art, with facial features that emphasized “Aryan” beauty. Figures of men were often nude and hairless, emphasizing the idea of a clean, self-contained, impermeable boundary at the skin. The torsos of the Nazi male archetype were modeled on breastplate armor to reinforce the idea of impermeability and lack of vulnerability. Feet were planted firmly apart, hands often doubled into fists, and visages sternly aimed at the horizon.12

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

It is surpassingly odd that so many of us will reprehend a
man or woman who exhibits racial animus or a man who makes misogynistic,
homophobic, or xenophobic remarks yet remain silent about soldiers who fly
across oceans to invade the lands of other peoples to abuse and kill them. Even
if we are willing to damn the invasions, the soldiers who do the wet work get a
pass. I say this because I was one of those soldiers, and even if I explicitly
tell people that I did this or that reprehensible thing, my contrition about it
stands me up as some kind of especially virtuous person – part of a ‘progressive’
redemption narrative.